What is Hunt made of…

There was a melt down, and I write that in the passive because that’s how it feels; a passive, dissociative melt down with a brake. I know what’s coming isn’t good, I know. But do I?

And still there is admin, and negotiation, and worries about extraneous things. I haven’t sorted my work questionnaire for DWP, who are back on the Fit Note references. I had a warning letter because time runs out on 6th. But I can’t do it, I can’t work out how to organise it, need to speak to HMRC, can’t work it out. Can’t decide.

I went to the Tavistock Macmillan drop in on Friday, they will write me a letter. I was talking about all sorts, but not really. My brain is in control in some sense, but I’ve lost me in there.

I sense skeins of spider silk, spinning from my brain, around my physical body, back through the mind, a kind of pupa perhaps. Such a weird physical, mental, emotional space. An evisceration of the idea of mind-body dualism, where I cannot tell cause from effect, psyche from physiology. My body is constrained by loss of sensory function in my face, legs and hands, dead numbness, equating to the numbness in my mind. I have an oval area about a foot long, laterally above my left knee, which is dead, yet burns intermittently; I thought it was an area of steroid-related sandpaper skin, of which I have several. But the skin there is soft. There is an absence of muscle, a flatness. The tight area in my skull where the craniotomy heals tugs gently across the diagonal. I’m weak. I sit and feel the weakness, draining, draining. Steroids? I’m still less than three weeks from the op. Permanent or temporary? A mix? My strong body is gone, and my mind struggles; and I know not whether either will return.

A swimming friend, whom I know only via Facebook, sent me Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal in both written and audio form. I read and listened, in short bursts over the past week or so. The gift was in response to my blog post Death and all his enemies about social care and our elderly people in particular, and the way we torture people at the end of their lives in such a misguided mess of enforced treatment and isolation. The book is astounding. I am already open to such ideas, yet the range of evidence and approaches, and some of the things I’ve personally done to persuade people to accept care, hit me too. How complicit are we all in this?

Then, where the book turns to treatment for illnesses such as mine, and the purpose of it, then to the boundaries of palliative care, I find myself reconsidering much about the treatments I might be willing to accept now – in particular brain radiotherapy which I know is the primary treatment for me whatever the outcome today. While Gawande talks about the market-driven US (not exclusively – his explanation of the extended family and their care for his own elderly forbears in India is englightening), there are plenty of vested interests at play anywhere Big Pharma and the medical model hold sway. Enmesh those with our current cultural refusal to discuss or accept death, and we have a complexity that is beyond us.

There are many people attempting to address these issues, and a few are succeeding in inspirational ways. But in a climate where failed austerity policies simply use such ideas as spin in order to justify cuts, and where profit trumps all other value, there will never be anything other than a mess. That’s the real choice; most of us will end up either dying from an illness, or decomposing into loneliness and frailty where the point of our lives is lost. That will most likely be you one day. So would you like a tax cut and a nightmare end? Or would you prefer to have excellent social and health care that ensures your happiness and a managed decline during which you aren’t locked in a nursing home without your pet, or the ability to wander off when you feel like it, or to drink your nightly G&T? It’s about control. Social enterprise, decent social services in the public sector. It’s not about profit for offshore hedge funds, or investment rooms in nursing homes.

I’ve no idea what’s going to happen later on when I find out exactly what Hunt was made of. But I know that I have choices, and I have plenty of research to undertake. I’m going alone to the appointment; I know it’s going to be hard, but I have to remove myself from the worry of how anyone else there is going to take the news too, and I can’t. So I’d rather take it in myself, make notes, and then explain later on.